The ABC allows comments on some of our articles, as a space for you to contribute your thoughts about news events and participate in civil conversations about topical issues.

All comments are moderated and we make no guarantees that your contribution will be published.

Reply

Author

Email

Date/Time

04 Mar 2015 11:12:59am

Text

PreviousMessage

I'm an atheist, but as an academic philosopher, Dawkins would do very well to read (or, if it's too big a change of field, study an advanced course in) Wittgenstein's work on bedrock beliefs. Most of our beliefs aren't based on any top-to-bottom rationality (not saying they're all equally irrational - just that rationality doesn't go 'all the way down' so to speak).

I believe in evolution because I read it in a book, and it was the kind of book that I've been culturally indoctrinated to trust (yes, we're all indoctrinated - we're a social species, so some indoctrination is part of our makeup: if you don't believe me, try to think of a convincing logical proof as to why morality matters in a non-pragmatic sense, or that people other than yourself have subjective experiences as opposed to just having the same behaviours and inner workings as yourself - philosophers have tried and failed for centuries: indoctrination that other people matter is just part of what humans are).

I've never carbon-dated anything, I wouldn't even know how to, and yet I don't believe that makes my belief in evolution any less rational. Reading it in a book is quite enough for me, and for most people who believe in evolution.

Now religion does cross over into areas that ARE empirically disprovable - historical claims, for example. But the notion of religion, and the non-physical mythology - these are bedrock beliefs, no more capable of being rationally challenged than my belief that I live in the real world and not the matrix (which I can't logically justify either).

Rationality gains its normative quality from its use when working from shared premises to show that a person's views are internally inconsistent. When applied to the bedrock beliefs from which a person's other beliefs spring, if we don't share those bedrock beliefs then of course we will find them absurd - but to call them irrational is to give the term quite a different meaning than the one we usually give it. In this latter case, where we aren't working from a shared set of bedrock beliefs, all we can mean by irrational is that we lack a shared basis to argue from.

Again, this doesn't justify all religious beliefs - there's arguably something inconsistent in accepting the scientific method in 95% of your life and then rejecting it as fraudulent when it challenges the idea that the world was created in 7 days (though Dawkins tends not to notice that very few christians outside of the US actually hold literalist interpretations of the Bible - for that matter, I suspect that most Australian lay-Christians, and certainly most I've met, hold a generally scientific view of the world with the addition of some loosely defined sense of spirituality and afterlife).